Autodesk primarily serves 4 industries:

1. AEC - Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (e.g. buildings)
2. MFG - Manufacturing (e.g., automobiles, appliances)
3. M&E - Media and Entertainment (e.g., movies, TV commercials)
4. ENI - Engineering, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure (e.g., bridges, roadways)

As of late we have started to reach out to consumers (a.k.a. creative non-professionals) who can help us hone our technologies as part of developing them for professionals in our four industries.

The other day we were looking at the download numbers by technology preview. Teams wanted to see how their technology preview compared to other technology previews past and current. I was asked if I had this data by industry. I did not. So I updated the schema in the database to include an industry field and then tagged all of our current and past technology previews by the primary industry the preview served. There were 126 technology previews where users were asked to download something. This allowed me to produce the following graph.

From this we can see that although consumers are the johnny-come-lately to this party, there are a lot of them, and the downloads add up quickly. With lots of downloads often comes lots of feedback. Honing a technology like Project Photofly based on consumer feedback (i.e., 123D Catch) will help if this technology ever makes its way into products like AutoCAD, Inventor, or Revit where professional users can model by starting with photographs and get the accuracy they need.

Industry-based analysis is alive in the lab.